Songs by genre

By Jongyoon Sohn, js5342@columbia.edu

People have been living in a world full of various sentiments such as excitements, sadness, happiness, etc. Songs have been used as representatives of emotions towards love, politics and even more. In this project, it will be showing some of characteristics that different genres have inherited.

Word counts

In order to look for some chracteristics in genres, the word counts are cacluated. The plot shows that there are obviously a number of words used in Rock than other genres. Two genres, Rock and Indie, are chosen to see if there are some differences.

Which words are used the most?

Two plots show that two genres have top frequently used words in common. For example, they all talk about youre, time, life a lot. Major differences in frequencies are hard to distinguish and common words are frequently used regardless of genres.

Emotions come from songs

First, let’s look at some of characteristis of stemmed words by the sentiment analysis referenced by the NRC lexicon. In each year, the frequencies of eight basic emotions were collected in percent and calculated to show the emotion distributions.

Emotions distribution

All eight emotions are expressed at word counts rates. At the first plot, joy, sadness, trust have the highest frequencies in use than others. In addition, the right plot shows the density distribution of skewness, which tells us that emotions such as surprise, disgust, fear are approximately normally distributed but those such as joy, sadness, anger are highly skewed.

What about Hip-Hop, Indie, Rock?

Ridgeline plots are made to represent the distribution of emotions used in Hip-Hop, Indie, and Rock. Obviously, the emotions used in each of three genres are distributed very differently.

Does time affect the sentiments?

Overall, joy and sadness are most used sentiments in songs regardless of genres, but the frequencies are starting to change constantly as time goes by.

Major differences in sentiments are found in Rock and Indie. The sentiment plot in Rock seems to follow the distribution of overall. Emotions used in different genres are distributed significantly different by time.

Conclusions